The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

[Modron]

Looks like the next game from Sony's Bend Studio (makers of Days Gone) is going to be a Triple A Live Service game.

Ah modern game design, studio makes a successful singleplayer game so publishers want them to make their next one a live service game. Sadly applies to asian developers as well.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Looks like the next game from Sony's Bend Studio (makers of Days Gone) is going to be a Triple A Live Service game.

Ah modern game design, studio makes a successful singleplayer game so publishers want them to make their next one a live service game. Sadly applies to asian developers as well.

Days Gone I don’t think was a successful single player game. Unless it’s budget was on the lower side of things, it probably didn’t do all that well.

 

[DemonKing]

When is the last "live service" game that didn't fail horribly?

HellDivers II seems to be doing ok.

 

[yellowcake]

Looks like the next game from Sony's Bend Studio (makers of Days Gone) is going to be a Triple A Live Service game.

Ah modern game design, studio makes a successful singleplayer game so publishers want them to make their next one a live service game. Sadly applies to asian developers as well.

Days Gone I don’t think was a successful single player game. Unless it’s budget was on the lower side of things, it probably didn’t do all that well.

Days gone mechanically is nothing special but it has its unique political charm in that you play as a "Deplorable" among deplorables. Rednecks, Magas etc. I doubt they make anything similar anytime soon.

 

[Morgoth]

Xbox Reportedly “Flatlining” in Europe, Publishers Question Support, More PS5 Ports Coming​

While Microsoft has tried to put a happy face on things, the future of Xbox – at least Xbox as a distinct brand with its own hardware and exclusives – has never been more in question. Last month Microsoft tried to calm worries with an Xbox Business Update, in which they revealed several older, smaller-scale games were going multiplatform, but that others, like Starfield, aren’t for now. Furthermore, they vowed to continue working on new hardware which will, apparently, deliver the “largest technical leap ever” (how they plan to deliver on that boast, I don’t know).


That all sounds good, but it may bump up against some rather stark realities Xbox is facing in the console space. According to GameIndustry.biz’s Christopher Dring, who’s proven to be a reliable source of industry new in the past, he’s heard from a “very prominent” publisher and another indie pub that Xbox Series X/S performance is “flatlining” in Europe. It was already not good last year, with some European retailers dropping Xbox Series X/S altogether, but it’s said to be even worse this year, to the point publishers are beginning to question why they’re bothering to support Xbox.

The possibly concerning points don’t end there – per Dring, he’s heard the “majority” of Xbox exclusives will end up on PS5 at some point, and that less focus is being put on Game Pass, which has largely plateaued in terms of popularity. Of course, take this with a grain of salt, but GamesIndustry isn’t known for pushing sensationalist headlines or sketchy rumors.


Microsoft can say they want to keep making hardware all they want, but if publishers stop being interested in putting their software on your platform, that’s where reality comes into play. That’s when things started to get scary for Nintendo during the Gamecube era. That’s what happened to Sega before they were forced to abandon hardware. “PC, PlayStation, and Xbox” being the standard platforms for all third-party games just isn’t something Microsoft can count on forever. With the purchase of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is now one of the biggest third-party publishers in the world, and it’s going to be hard to escape gravity pulling them further in that direction.


What do you think? Do you see a future where a traditional Xbox platform remains a thing or is the writing on the wall?

Not even Toddfield can save the Kwanbox.

 

[deuxhero]

When is the last "live service" game that didn't fail horribly?

HellDivers II seems to be doing ok.

Is that even a live service game?

 

[TedNugent]

Xbox Reportedly “Flatlining” in Europe, Publishers Question Support, More PS5 Ports Coming​

While Microsoft has tried to put a happy face on things, the future of Xbox – at least Xbox as a distinct brand with its own hardware and exclusives – has never been more in question. Last month Microsoft tried to calm worries with an Xbox Business Update, in which they revealed several older, smaller-scale games were going multiplatform, but that others, like Starfield, aren’t for now. Furthermore, they vowed to continue working on new hardware which will, apparently, deliver the “largest technical leap ever” (how they plan to deliver on that boast, I don’t know).


That all sounds good, but it may bump up against some rather stark realities Xbox is facing in the console space. According to GameIndustry.biz’s Christopher Dring, who’s proven to be a reliable source of industry new in the past, he’s heard from a “very prominent” publisher and another indie pub that Xbox Series X/S performance is “flatlining” in Europe. It was already not good last year, with some European retailers dropping Xbox Series X/S altogether, but it’s said to be even worse this year, to the point publishers are beginning to question why they’re bothering to support Xbox.

The possibly concerning points don’t end there – per Dring, he’s heard the “majority” of Xbox exclusives will end up on PS5 at some point, and that less focus is being put on Game Pass, which has largely plateaued in terms of popularity. Of course, take this with a grain of salt, but GamesIndustry isn’t known for pushing sensationalist headlines or sketchy rumors.


Microsoft can say they want to keep making hardware all they want, but if publishers stop being interested in putting their software on your platform, that’s where reality comes into play. That’s when things started to get scary for Nintendo during the Gamecube era. That’s what happened to Sega before they were forced to abandon hardware. “PC, PlayStation, and Xbox” being the standard platforms for all third-party games just isn’t something Microsoft can count on forever. With the purchase of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is now one of the biggest third-party publishers in the world, and it’s going to be hard to escape gravity pulling them further in that direction.


What do you think? Do you see a future where a traditional Xbox platform remains a thing or is the writing on the wall?

Not even Toddfield can save the Kwanbox.

Never been more in question? Christ, the Xbox AND the GameCube were both lemons. They sold under 25 million each, whereas the PS2 sold over 150 million consoles, three times both of them put together. The PS2 was the most successful console of all time, even upending the colossal success of the PS1. The Xbox Series S/X are actually closely approaching Xbox lifetime sales in a little over three years. Not a complete disaster for one of the biggest companies in the world with deep pockets.

I scarcely think that the Xbox is suffering in comparison to the complete blowout they experienced with their first console release. By the way, even the 360 was always a shit factory in Europe and especially Japan, but it didn't really when it came to overall sales figures.

Either way, I can't wait to see their new creepy artificial intelligence driven advertising box! Maybe it'll have Bing Chat integration and Cortana can give you helpful ASMR when you're trying to go to sleep (after it learns your circadian rhythm and sleeping habits ofc).

 

[Konjad]

Does it even matter at this point? Consoles already destroyed PC market with complete consolization, even if they are gone all 'modern' designs will stay.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Europe is PlayStation land, and they mostly just seem to play EA soccer video games. Unless you’re trying to sell a soccer video game Europe largely seems to not really matter.

 

[Ash]

Does it even matter at this point? Consoles already destroyed PC market with complete consolization, even if they are gone all 'modern' designs will stay.

Lol that wasn't evil console's scheming, their inferior CPUs, or anything like that. That was your beloved PC developers selling out and abandoning the PC out of greed when it was completely unnecessary to do so, spearheaded by the equally greedy Microsoft. This ruined PC and console gaming both. This exact event. PC developers and manufacturers in their evil greed. Nintendo and Sony and whoever else in the console sphere of influence had fuck all to do with it. Initially at least. At some point they responded to PC devs invasion of the console market and it wasn't pretty for console gaming either. A race to the bottom.

Just look at PC gaming today, going pretty strong in terms of popularity. Consoles on the other hand have dipped somewhat. The xbox and sellout retard games were completely unnecessary. They could have doubled down on PC gaming in 2000, but no, lets just ruin everything out of greed. Fuck em all.

 

[TedNugent]

Europe is PlayStation land, and they mostly just seem to play EA soccer video games. Unless you’re trying to sell a soccer video game Europe largely seems to not really matter.

Ironic considering you could play that shit on a Wii? I would think that sportsballers would tend to the Xbox.

The nice thing about Sony is that they actually had decent first and second party support. God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Gran Turismo. They had some decent teenybopper adventure and kids games. Of course, the amount of software was nuts back during PS2 and PS1 era. The shelves at the gamebox stores were like a fucking ocean of PS2 DVD cases. Most of which was shovelware, but still. If you wanted to fill a dump truck of mediocre games, PS2 got you.

Does it even matter at this point? Consoles already destroyed PC market with complete consolization, even if they are gone all 'modern' designs will stay.

Lol that wasn't evil console's scheming, their inferior CPUs, or anything like that. That was your beloved PC developers selling out and abandoning the PC out of greed when it was completely unnecessary to do so, spearheaded by the equally greedy Microsoft. This ruined PC and console gaming both. This exact event. PC developers and manufacturers in their evil greed. Nintendo and Sony and whoever else in the console sphere of influence had fuck all to do with it. Initially at least. At some point they responded to PC devs invasion of the console market and it wasn't pretty for console gaming either. A race to the bottom.

Just look at PC gaming today, going pretty strong in terms of popularity. Consoles on the other hand have dipped somewhat. The xbox and sellout retard games were completely unnecessary. They could have doubled down on PC gaming in 2000, but no, lets just ruin everything out of greed. Fuck em all.

Modern consoles basically are PCs, just with mediocre specifications. They are using AMD integrated graphics and x86-64 CPU with standard RAM and SSD, nothing stupid or zany.

People forget, the PlayStation 2 didn't have a GPU, and the Playstation 3 was some kind of monstrous hydra with a 7 core in-order processor. Most console processors now have out of order logic processing and standard multi core CPUs. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are running the same kind of hardware that runs in a desktop.

That's also been kind of a godsend because I remember before the PS4 and Xbox One were announced, AMD was sitting around 3 dollars a share, and now they're nearly at 200 dollars a share, mostly because they have pretty much exclusively been manufacturing console graphics. Same with the Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, and the MSI handheld. It's all AMD hardware. That's been a big deal considering that Intel and Nvidia were kicking the shit out of AMD for like a decade in the desktop market. It was one of the few things keeping their only competitor in the game with an ample cashflow, and they even have an advantage over Intel in that their integrated GPUs have been significantly faster even when they lag in raw CPU performance compared to the top end Intel chips.

That standardized hardware has also made consoles less of walled gardens and made it much easier to do things like....porting the entire Uncharted series, Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Last of Us, Halo, etc etc to the PC. It's made console and PC porting back and forth as well as cross platform development much less hellish. That's why, frankly, Microsoft could easily transition to being a software publisher and not lose much....if they end up sinking in the hardware market, oh well, they literally own Bethesda and Activision.

Microsoft has also been a pretty decent steward in the sense that they allowed Steam to thrive, Microsoft games generally play nice on Windows, and they don't seem to be bothered by PC gaming in parallel with Xbox, even encouraging it with GamePass. Also, the original Xbox basically was a PC, it had a Pentium 3 and an Nvidia GPU (hence why Half Life 2 and Doom 3 ported so easily, despite the relatively shitty hardware specs). I absolutely loathe Microsoft as a company, and I refuse to run Windows these days or buy an Xbox, but I don't recall them ever getting in the way of my gaming. It is, after all, the reason why 95% of Windows lemmings will never switch to MacOS or Linux, and Microsoft knows this...

 

[lycanwarrior]

Xbox Boss Wants Epic, Other Stores on Console, Dropping Exclusivity Partly for Gen Z Appeal​

https://wccftech.com/xbox-spencer-epic-games-store-console-dropping-exclusivity-gen-z-appeal/

Interestingly, in his effort to upend the console business, Spencer is even willing to take aim at the core financial model that makes them possible. Basically, companies sell consoles at a narrow profit or even a loss, but make up for it by having a monopoly on the games sold on that console. Spencer, meanwhile, would be willing to let storefronts like the Epic Games Store, Itch.io, and others on Xbox (Polygon’s article doesn’t mention Steam for whatever reason).

 

[tritosine2k]

Give KB + M

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Xbox Boss Wants Epic, Other Stores on Console, Dropping Exclusivity Partly for Gen Z Appeal​

https://wccftech.com/xbox-spencer-epic-games-store-console-dropping-exclusivity-gen-z-appeal/

Interestingly, in his effort to upend the console business, Spencer is even willing to take aim at the core financial model that makes them possible. Basically, companies sell consoles at a narrow profit or even a loss, but make up for it by having a monopoly on the games sold on that console. Spencer, meanwhile, would be willing to let storefronts like the Epic Games Store, Itch.io, and others on Xbox (Polygon’s article doesn’t mention Steam for whatever reason).

I wonder if this actually has more to do with the recent lawsuit the DOJ is bring against Apple for the iPhone being a closed system than it does any Gen Z bullshit. Apple having a “monopoly” over their phone as far as I can tell isn’t any different from how consoles have been doing things since before the iPhone was a thing...and Microsoft is in a distance third places as far as console sales go. It’s possible they see the DOJ case with Apple as a way of finally getting Xbox Game Pass (their real new business) on the other consoles.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Europe is PlayStation land, and they mostly just seem to play EA soccer video games. Unless you’re trying to sell a soccer video game Europe largely seems to not really matter.

Ironic considering you could play that shit on a Wii? I would think that sportsballers would tend to the Xbox.

The nice thing about Sony is that they actually had decent first and second party support. God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Gran Turismo. They had some decent teenybopper adventure and kids games. Of course, the amount of software was nuts back during PS2 and PS1 era. The shelves at the gamebox stores were like a fucking ocean of PS2 DVD cases. Most of which was shovelware, but still. If you wanted to fill a dump truck of mediocre games, PS2 got you.

Does it even matter at this point? Consoles already destroyed PC market with complete consolization, even if they are gone all 'modern' designs will stay.

Lol that wasn't evil console's scheming, their inferior CPUs, or anything like that. That was your beloved PC developers selling out and abandoning the PC out of greed when it was completely unnecessary to do so, spearheaded by the equally greedy Microsoft. This ruined PC and console gaming both. This exact event. PC developers and manufacturers in their evil greed. Nintendo and Sony and whoever else in the console sphere of influence had fuck all to do with it. Initially at least. At some point they responded to PC devs invasion of the console market and it wasn't pretty for console gaming either. A race to the bottom.

Just look at PC gaming today, going pretty strong in terms of popularity. Consoles on the other hand have dipped somewhat. The xbox and sellout retard games were completely unnecessary. They could have doubled down on PC gaming in 2000, but no, lets just ruin everything out of greed. Fuck em all.

Modern consoles basically are PCs, just with mediocre specifications. They are using AMD integrated graphics and x86-64 CPU with standard RAM and SSD, nothing stupid or zany.

People forget, the PlayStation 2 didn't have a GPU, and the Playstation 3 was some kind of monstrous hydra with a 7 core in-order processor. Most console processors now have out of order logic processing and standard multi core CPUs. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are running the same kind of hardware that runs in a desktop.

That's also been kind of a godsend because I remember before the PS4 and Xbox One were announced, AMD was sitting around 3 dollars a share, and now they're nearly at 200 dollars a share, mostly because they have pretty much exclusively been manufacturing console graphics. Same with the Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, and the MSI handheld. It's all AMD hardware. That's been a big deal considering that Intel and Nvidia were kicking the shit out of AMD for like a decade in the desktop market. It was one of the few things keeping their only competitor in the game with an ample cashflow, and they even have an advantage over Intel in that their integrated GPUs have been significantly faster even when they lag in raw CPU performance compared to the top end Intel chips.

That standardized hardware has also made consoles less of walled gardens and made it much easier to do things like....porting the entire Uncharted series, Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Last of Us, Halo, etc etc to the PC. It's made console and PC porting back and forth as well as cross platform development much less hellish. That's why, frankly, Microsoft could easily transition to being a software publisher and not lose much....if they end up sinking in the hardware market, oh well, they literally own Bethesda and Activision.

Microsoft has also been a pretty decent steward in the sense that they allowed Steam to thrive, Microsoft games generally play nice on Windows, and they don't seem to be bothered by PC gaming in parallel with Xbox, even encouraging it with GamePass. Also, the original Xbox basically was a PC, it had a Pentium 3 and an Nvidia GPU (hence why Half Life 2 and Doom 3 ported so easily, despite the relatively shitty hardware specs). I absolutely loathe Microsoft as a company, and I refuse to run Windows these days or buy an Xbox, but I don't recall them ever getting in the way of my gaming. It is, after all, the reason why 95% of Windows lemmings will never switch to MacOS or Linux, and Microsoft knows this...

Microsoft has to play nice now. If Don Mattrick hadn’t fucked up Microsoft’s lead going into the Xbox One, and the Xbox One had continued the lead they had with the 360, I’m gonna guess Microsoft wouldn’t have spent the last decade being as nice and open has they have been. They probably

I wouldn’t say Microsoft allowed Steam to thrive. Steam sucks, but Steam was allowed to thrive because Games for Windows fucking sucked, and for whatever reason Microsoft gave up their dominance of the indie scene in 2012. It’s like Steam Greenlight happened and Microsoft just stopped carrying about that stuff going into 2013. Like Steam had been a storefront with third party titles for years before, but Steam didn’t really come into their own until Microsoft just gave up the indie market to them (and to a lesser degree Sony) in 2013.

 

[Ezekiel]

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-...t-inclusion-actions/help-customers-feel-seen/

Questions to Consider​

• Are you telling new stories or sharing new perspectives within the product experience?
• Do all of your characters/player depictions look the same?
• What steps have you taken to ensure characters are represented respectfully and authentically?
• How have you validated assumptions you have made about your audience to check for blind spots or unintended stereotypes?
• Would you feel proud to show a member of a community how their culture/character is depicted within your experience?
• How are the wide range of customers depicted within your products, content portfolio and communications?
• What process have you used to validate how different groups of people or cultures are represented in your experience?
• Are you reinforcing any negative gender stereotypes?
  • Are you unnecessarily introducing gender & gender barriers into your code or design?
  • Are you creating playable female characters that are equal in skill and ability to their male peers. Are your female characters equipped with clothing and armor that fits their tasks? Do they have exaggerated body proportions?
  • When the story allows, do you show male characters who display a full range of emotions, including joy, sadness, and vulnerability?
• What % of screen time (on screen presence, speaking lines, heroes) is held by different gender/racial identities?
• Do you have a process to review key decisions with the lens of Helping Customers Feel Seen?

 

[Morgoth]

Just fucking die already Microsoft.

 

[TedNugent]

Just fucking die already Microsoft.

How many of you are on Windows 10 right now, and are you ready for loss of security patches next year?

 

[Zarniwoop]

Europe is PlayStation land, and they mostly just seem to play EA soccer video games. Unless you’re trying to sell a soccer video game Europe largely seems to not really matter.

Ironic considering you could play that shit on a Wii? I would think that sportsballers would tend to the Xbox.

The nice thing about Sony is that they actually had decent first and second party support. God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Gran Turismo. They had some decent teenybopper adventure and kids games. Of course, the amount of software was nuts back during PS2 and PS1 era. The shelves at the gamebox stores were like a fucking ocean of PS2 DVD cases. Most of which was shovelware, but still. If you wanted to fill a dump truck of mediocre games, PS2 got you.

Does it even matter at this point? Consoles already destroyed PC market with complete consolization, even if they are gone all 'modern' designs will stay.

Lol that wasn't evil console's scheming, their inferior CPUs, or anything like that. That was your beloved PC developers selling out and abandoning the PC out of greed when it was completely unnecessary to do so, spearheaded by the equally greedy Microsoft. This ruined PC and console gaming both. This exact event. PC developers and manufacturers in their evil greed. Nintendo and Sony and whoever else in the console sphere of influence had fuck all to do with it. Initially at least. At some point they responded to PC devs invasion of the console market and it wasn't pretty for console gaming either. A race to the bottom.

Just look at PC gaming today, going pretty strong in terms of popularity. Consoles on the other hand have dipped somewhat. The xbox and sellout retard games were completely unnecessary. They could have doubled down on PC gaming in 2000, but no, lets just ruin everything out of greed. Fuck em all.

Modern consoles basically are PCs, just with mediocre specifications. They are using AMD integrated graphics and x86-64 CPU with standard RAM and SSD, nothing stupid or zany.

People forget, the PlayStation 2 didn't have a GPU, and the Playstation 3 was some kind of monstrous hydra with a 7 core in-order processor. Most console processors now have out of order logic processing and standard multi core CPUs. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are running the same kind of hardware that runs in a desktop.

That's also been kind of a godsend because I remember before the PS4 and Xbox One were announced, AMD was sitting around 3 dollars a share, and now they're nearly at 200 dollars a share, mostly because they have pretty much exclusively been manufacturing console graphics. Same with the Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, and the MSI handheld. It's all AMD hardware. That's been a big deal considering that Intel and Nvidia were kicking the shit out of AMD for like a decade in the desktop market. It was one of the few things keeping their only competitor in the game with an ample cashflow, and they even have an advantage over Intel in that their integrated GPUs have been significantly faster even when they lag in raw CPU performance compared to the top end Intel chips.

That standardized hardware has also made consoles less of walled gardens and made it much easier to do things like....porting the entire Uncharted series, Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Last of Us, Halo, etc etc to the PC. It's made console and PC porting back and forth as well as cross platform development much less hellish. That's why, frankly, Microsoft could easily transition to being a software publisher and not lose much....if they end up sinking in the hardware market, oh well, they literally own Bethesda and Activision.

Microsoft has also been a pretty decent steward in the sense that they allowed Steam to thrive, Microsoft games generally play nice on Windows, and they don't seem to be bothered by PC gaming in parallel with Xbox, even encouraging it with GamePass. Also, the original Xbox basically was a PC, it had a Pentium 3 and an Nvidia GPU (hence why Half Life 2 and Doom 3 ported so easily, despite the relatively shitty hardware specs). I absolutely loathe Microsoft as a company, and I refuse to run Windows these days or buy an Xbox, but I don't recall them ever getting in the way of my gaming. It is, after all, the reason why 95% of Windows lemmings will never switch to MacOS or Linux, and Microsoft knows this...

Microsoft has always been a software company. It's right there in the name.

Their money has always come from making the OS normal people use, apart from US West Coast faggots (MacOS) or programmer nerds with a lot of time on their hands (Linux), and Office.

Nowadays its "cloud" shit like Office 365 and Azure. They are building enough datacenters to cover the earth in a few years. The hardware division, xbawx, and all gaming related stuff has always been an afterthought.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I wouldn’t say the Xbox was an afterthought. It more a long game play from Microsoft. The Xbox was originally meant to be Microsoft’s in to controlling the living room like they already controlled the office space and PC. They were making video games consoles as a means to enter the living room space, and their hope seemed to be that the Xbox would be the machine you had in your living room that your TV would eventually run through.

There biggest move towards that was the Xbox One, incidentally the way they rolled that out, combined with rumors of things that never ended up happening, torpedoed all the momentum they’d amassed during the 360 era. Although by 2013 cheaper options like Roku and Blu-ray players with streaming capabilities killed the idea of some $500 piece of hardware being the media control center of the living room...and now you’ve got free streaming services with “channels,” and the ability to pull of any local news broadcast from around the US.

Xbox now is about Xbox Game Pass. Although Xbox was always been all about subscription models since seeing how much money they were bring in with Xbox Live. And controlling the living room was originally about them working out a way to get a share of that old cable/satellite money. Maybe somewhere now the road with phones and tablets are more powerful they’re return to controlling the living room that way. Although I think in the very near future the battle for the living room will be VR where people can watch and play things on gargantuan virtual screens.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

The Xbox exists to fuck with Soyny.

They'll never, ever make their money back from the Activision buyout, it was purely spite to deny CoD revenue to playstation. They went full retard in panic and paid through the nose for bungie, so much that they're now gutting their own developers to balance the books.

MS nearly got away with it until the CMA cucked the deal and forced concessions.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Call of Duty was never leaving PlayStation. Being on PlayStation brings in billions of dollars for Call of Duty every year. That anyone even thought CoD might leave PlayStation was stupid. Even the Sony people saying Microsoft was trying to take CoD away from PlayStation didn’t actually believe Microsoft was going to do that.

King was also a huge get for Microsoft in that deal too. People tend to not think about them because they’re mobile, and PC and console gamers don’t give much of a shit about mobile, but King brings in billions every year and I’m fairly sure they don’t spend anywhere near what the other studios do that make about as much or much less.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-...t-inclusion-actions/help-customers-feel-seen/

Questions to Consider​

• Are you telling new stories or sharing new perspectives within the product experience?
• Do all of your characters/player depictions look the same?
• What steps have you taken to ensure characters are represented respectfully and authentically?
• How have you validated assumptions you have made about your audience to check for blind spots or unintended stereotypes?
• Would you feel proud to show a member of a community how their culture/character is depicted within your experience?
• How are the wide range of customers depicted within your products, content portfolio and communications?
• What process have you used to validate how different groups of people or cultures are represented in your experience?
• Are you reinforcing any negative gender stereotypes?
  • Are you unnecessarily introducing gender & gender barriers into your code or design?
  • Are you creating playable female characters that are equal in skill and ability to their male peers. Are your female characters equipped with clothing and armor that fits their tasks? Do they have exaggerated body proportions?
  • When the story allows, do you show male characters who display a full range of emotions, including joy, sadness, and vulnerability?
• What % of screen time (on screen presence, speaking lines, heroes) is held by different gender/racial identities?
• Do you have a process to review key decisions with the lens of Helping Customers Feel Seen?

The thing that’s funny about this is people aren’t buying Microsoft’s games. Microsoft can’t sell games. So why the fuck would anyone listen to what Microsoft has to say about getting customers? If Microsoft is telling you how to reach a wider audience you should be doing the opposite of what Microsoft is saying.

 

[TedNugent]

The Xbox exists to fuck with Soyny.

They'll never, ever make their money back from the Activision buyout, it was purely spite to deny CoD revenue to playstation. They went full retard in panic and paid through the nose for bungie, so much that they're now gutting their own developers to balance the books.

MS nearly got away with it until the CMA cucked the deal and forced concessions.

I don't understand why anyone would try to buy Bungie anyway.

They haven't really done anything since Halo, which they were making for a decade. Destiny is....really, really lame.

The fact that Sony gutted their own first party development studios is even weirder, since they're the only thing of interest on PlayStation. They stopped being the de facto mass consumer platform after the 360 stole their thunder and became the standard for multiplatform releases. They no longer can point to a massive exclusive third party library like they had in the PS2 days. On the PS3 especially, it was almost entirely about the first and second party releases. God of War, Resistance, Ratchet, Little Big Planet, Uncharted. They actually had a good case with a handful of these titles, and that's why many early 360 adopters and Wiitards eventually dipped their toes in once the PS3 was actually affordable.

I still don't understand why either of these companies are bothering with these massive acquisitions of shitty third party publishers. Even the Activision acquisition seemed like a huge mistake. I doubt Mickeysoft is ever going to make back their initial investment. What do they have to troll Sony with this on, exactly? They now have the albatross of Blizzard? Are they just going to monopolize (some) Call of Duty DLC packs or something? If you preorder it on Windows first, you get a free technicolor neon baby poop skin for your AK47 and an extra team deathmatch warehouse map? Anyway, Steam is going to take their cut on their storefront regardless, and so is Sony...

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I’m not getting the thinking of you guys when it comes to Call of Duty. Microsoft doesn’t give a fuck where you play Call of Duty, just that you are playing it. Warzone pulls in a few billion a year. King pulls in a few billion a year. The influx of studios they got in the Activision deal can be used to flesh out their Xbox Game Pass service which is making a few billion a year and growing.

Call of Duty is big enough that they view it like a platform. Just like they view Minecraft as a platform.

The albatross of Blizzard makes no sense either. They’ve gotten a lot of bad PR. And they’ve been doing a lot of stupid shit. But they announced back a couple months after Diablo 4 came out that they reached 12 million players. So it probably did pretty go for them despite all the problems.

If Blizzard was smart, they’d just go back to something like the first Diablo (one hub area with a big dungeon to explore) with the series. They could turn those out every two or three years, spend way less money than they have been developing Diablo games, and still sell to as many people as they already are. This thing where they’re piss away seven years developing a Diablo game is fucking stupid. It’s even dumber when it’s been designed to be something that hangs around for years, lots of people hate it, and Blizzard seemingly has no idea how to fix it.